Blog: Remember when that firefighter filmed himself getting into a tumble dryer and switching it on? asks Thom Kennedy. And how killjoy elf ’n’ safety officials had a go at him?

Time was when you could get away with merriment in the office without the looming spectre of those boring rotters coming along and ruining everyone’s fun.

You could merrily march helmetless on to your building site, and have carefree nailgun shoot-outs with your mates without worrying some pen pusher was going to dob you in and get you sacked.

And you wouldn’t have to worry about putting up proper scaffolding when you’re demolishing a building, you can just go running about on the roof – saves time and effort, gets the job done, bish bash bosh, but you can’t work next week because you fell through and broke your back. Bonus! You get to watch Jeremy Kyle!

Ages ago, you barely had to worry about health and safety at all – you just chucked the boy up the chimney and if he got stuck you waited until he’d starved to the point where he could slither out.

Well those halcyon days of carefree irresponsibility could be on their way back under new proposals from the Government to review all health and safety laws with a view to scrapping any that put an ‘unnecessary’ burden on business.

This doesn’t sound to me like a means of improving conditions for businesses, it won’t encourage banks to lend and it won’t suddenly inject money into an ailing economy. ‘Focusing on high-hazard sites’, as employment minister Chris Grayling says should be the case, shouldn’t be a specific policy; it should be an automatic assumption under a policy designed to keep as many people alive and healthy as it possibly can.

Health and safety is important. It’s why people come home from work safely at the end of each day. It’s the regulation which keeps people in difficult, dangerous professions safe from harm day after day.

Taking a scythe to it is only a short leap from implying that the workforce is disposable. People deserve the right to get home at the end of the day with a clean bill of health, and to leave each morning without worrying that they could die. A distaste for having to wear a high visibility tabard is hardly justification for getting rid of it.

This isn’t a society where people are killed because the government thinks they had to fill out too many forms. This isn’t the 19th century. So why are we making policies that suggest that it is?